John Raoux/AP Photo
Joella Krzyzanski walks past a large oak tree that fell at her apartment complex after Hurricane Milton passed, October 10, 2024, in Sanford, Florida.
Before the storms of September and October 2024, environmental activist Cindy Banyai, a candidate for Fort Myers City Council, cited the health threats posed by the city’s aging water infrastructure and waterways polluted by fecal matter among her top issues. Manuel’s Branch, a creek behind the high school, was the site of the city’s largest sewage leaks four years ago. It hasn’t been properly remediated, so students who like to throw shoes in the creek and “mess around” there, says Banyai, run the risk of exposure to harmful bacteria.
After the one-two punch of Helene and Milton, Floridians aren’t in the mood for politics. The first hurricane left a trail of severe destruction in the Big Bend region connecting the Florida Panhandle to the peninsula. To the south, Fort Myers experienced minor wind damage and storm surge flooding in the downtown business district and nearby homes.
Short of funds and burdened with an unreliable car by the time Milton began to bear down on Florida, Banyai and her family hunkered down in their tiny, cinder-block cottage 27 feet above sea level. Her neighborhood had not been under a mandatory evacuation order. “The mood is trying to stay alive,” she told me Tuesday. “The anxiety is horrible, it’s very surreal.”
Voting by mail had gotten under way in Florida earlier in the month. But mail service has been suspended in many places along the Gulf Coast. Many voters will have trouble finding a functioning post office to return their ballots to if they didn’t lose them during the evacuation or the storm. County clerks are already scouting out new locations for voting. Millions are still without power, areas that were thought to be safe flooded, and hurricane-spawned tornadoes caused even more destruction. Up and down the Gulf Coast and across the state, Election 2024 is the furthest thing from people’s minds. “It’s absolutely destroyed campaigning,” Banyai told me.
Florida’s hurricane history means that it is one of the best-prepared states to handle the disruptions. Early in-person voting begins on October 21. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has indicated that the hardest-hit counties would be able to make adjustments to mail procedures and in-person voting locations, as the state did for Southwest Florida districts in 2022 after Hurricane Ian, when Fort Myers went from nearly 100 voting locations to 12. Pinellas County—St. Petersburg is the largest city—will need to relocate as many as 40 polling places.
But Kevin Morris, a Brennan Center for Justice researcher, has noted that the governor did not offer a new deadline for mail-in ballots, which must be received by Election Day, November 5. Meeting that deadline will be difficult for displaced residents, who would need ballots mailed to new addresses. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Hinkle, however, refused to extend the voter registration deadline of October 7, despite the fact that many voters had begun evacuating that day, two days before Milton made landfall, and many more had left more than a week earlier before Helene. The judge argued, “If they had evacuated, they still could have registered while evacuating if they had a cell phone.”
No matter how vigorous the federal response is, those efforts still may not redound to Harris’s benefit.
Post-hurricane logistics may prove to be too complex for some voters. “Are they going to make the effort to figure out how to make their vote by mail? Are they going to stand in a line and figure out where their relocated voting precinct is? If they relocated [or] had to flee, are they going to try to vote by mail?” asks Banyai. “The answer that we saw from Ian is no.”
Milton certainly changes the calculus for the presidential race. Democrats had a scintilla of optimism that, with President Biden out of the race and abortion and marijuana ballot questions on the ballot, energized Florida Democratic voters, independents, and more than a few Republicans could boost Kamala Harris against Donald Trump. But a New York Times/Siena poll for the period of September 29 through October 6 of 600 likely voters suggests otherwise: Trump leads the vice president by nearly ten percentage points. (A Marist poll conducted October 3–7 showed a closer race, with Harris down four points to Trump.)
No matter how vigorous the federal response is, those efforts still may not redound to Harris’s benefit. Disputes about FEMA temporary housing after Ian and resentments about payments to disaster survivors when compared, for example, to military aid to Ukraine have provoked anger among voters, who have fallen prey to misinformation campaigns. Gov. DeSantis’s fits of petulance about federal help get interpreted in partisan terms: Anti-government types applaud his decision to ignore Biden and Harris, while Democrats wonder why he doesn’t want to coordinate a united response.
Harris’s so-called media blitz has generally earned positive reviews elsewhere, but Florida political analyst Susan MacManus cautions that drinking beer with a late-night talk show host is not the best look when large swaths of the country are trying to recover from natural disasters and government agencies are working overtime trying to combat misinformation campaigns.
Her messaging about the economy is not connecting either, says MacManus, a retired University of South Florida political science professor. “Democrats are talking over the heads of workaday voters,” she explains. MacManus rode out the storm with relatives on her pine tree farm 20 miles north of Tampa. “When I speak to Democratic groups, I say when you’re talking about economy, go out and ask ten people, what does GDP mean [or] opportunity economy mean? The language that’s been used is not connecting on the economic front, and I wonder why [Harris] hasn’t got some people that help her figure out a better way to talk about it than she’s doing.”
The race more likely to produce a statewide upset is the Senate contest between Democratic former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Republican Sen. Rick Scott. “[Mucarsel-Powell] is doing better because national Democrats finally put some dollars into her campaign,” says MacManus. “Her ads right now are dominating the air, and you can see definitely an improvement.” The early-October Marist Poll had Mucarsel-Powell within two points.
The state’s generational voting trends may help Mucarsel-Powell. Millennials and Generation Z make up one-third of Florida voters. More young people are registering as “no party affiliation” and are more attuned to candidates and issues rather than party loyalties.
Scott has a roster of negatives. One of the wealthiest members of the Senate, he is a climate denier, a supporter of the state’s six-week abortion ban, and uniquely unpopular among both Democrats and many Republicans. Although Republicans are competitive on the economy and overall have a one-million-vote advantage over Democrats going into the 2024 contest, the youth vote is a double-edged sword for both parties. In 2022, only about 23 percent of Florida voters aged 18–29 cast a ballot, the ninth-worst showing in the country and a stunning 10 percent drop from 2020. Scott has one thing going for him: tons of his own money.
After back-to-back disasters and whatever the hurricane season has left in store, don’t count on Florida to swing. “The bottom line is, if I’ve had my house destroyed, the last thing on my mind, really, is voting,” says MacManus.
This post has been updated.
